Hugo Santiago Muchnick may be the best-kept secret of Argentinean cinema. It is true that his Argentine filmography is minimal, for he, as Frenchified as he was, ended up self-exiled in Paris and almost his whole work was made in Europe. But there is no doubt that he was a great talent, a true avant-garde artist, even if the label today sounds too outworn. Hugo Santiago is an island in Argentinean cinema, if only for his first feature, the masterful «Invasión».
It is true that writers Adolfo Bioy Casares («La invención de Morel») and Jorge Luis Borges («El aleph») contributed to this and a few others of Santiago's films. It is obvious that their concepts and ideas about art influenced the final works. However, when you see a few frames of «Invasión» you know that you are watching the work of a man of cinema rather than a man of letters. Santiago was a man of moving images and autonomous sounds, who induces us into a fascinating fantasy of revolutionary romanticism, its decadence and reemergence as the Phoenix.
Released in 1969 in the old Teatro Central in the city of Panamá, «Invasión» took us all by surprise. So much so that, until yesterday, when I saw it again, I realized that it had been buried in my memory as something exceptional, but that it also made me unable to evoke it or tell its plot, as maybe Santiago, Borges, Bioy Casares and all the others involved in the movie wanted us to end, under the spell of an old fashioned left-wing cell that executed its plans in secrecy and eliminated all vestiges. Maybe it was because of its detachment as an aesthetic proposal, its innovative narrative or its challenge to realism. Back then, the movie was warmly received at the International Film Festival of Panama. I remember with humor that we arranged an interview with the leading actress Olga Zubarry and, when we were in front of her, we could not say a word! That is how dazzled we were.
First part of an unfinished trilogy about the fictitious city of Aquilea, «Invasión» tells us about the activity of several units of the Aquilean Resistance, although it is not clear who or what they are resisting. All we are told is that such actions are necessary before a possible invasion by unidentified forces. Herrera (Lautaro Murúa) receives orders from the leader of the resistance, Don Porfirio (Juan Carlos Paz), while Irene (Zubarry), Herrera's wife, takes part in actions of the Aquileia youth force, who may or may not be allies of the invaders. As a synthesis of the plot, this synopsis does not give you a complete panorama of the visual and aural effect of the film. You have to see it to perceive its privileged place in the history of Argentinean cinema, beyond the well-known merits of «Dios de lo pague», «El exilio de Gardel (Tangos)», «El aura» or «Relatos salvajes». It does not surprise me at all to read that several critics claim that this is the best Argentinean film of all time.
Before making his first work, Hugo Santiago was Robert Bresson's assistant for seven years, during which he witnessed the emergence of new cinemas in France, Italy, the UK, Poland and Czechoslovakia. In those years, the filmmaker watched the works of the great masters of the time, so it is not strange to see the influence of Antonioni's «Eclisse», Godard's «Alphaville» or Wajda's «Popiól i diament». In Santiago's film there are also echoes of classic Russian literature and even elements from the James Bond series, with fast persecutions and characters' heroic postures. Santiago did not follow the Bressonian practice of using actors as models, but allowed the cast to make true creations of tragic beings, trapped in an oppressive political plot.
Today, 50 years after its creation, what I find more fascinating is the three writers' visionary perception. «Invasión» presciently anticipated what would happen in Argentina during the years of military dictatorship, when terror emerged at home. Here the invaders are equal to the Aquileans, so the worst enemies of the community are people who come from the same community. They may belong to a different social class, have other phenotypes and faces, use different brands of cars or clothes, but in the end they are just the same breed. The traitors to the collective longings are "from home". We also see how (in 1969) the authors described the way the "invaders" tortured the resistance with cattle prod and beat people in stadiums, as it would happen years later.
In statements made to the press, co-author Bioy Casares drew a parallel between Aquileia and Troy, as a city corroded from inside. a city that devoured its children. However, in the resolution of the work, there is hope and a change of forces is promptly executed, in an eternal return to the starting point of the search for truth, as Argentina has been forced to do so many times.
Photographed in black and white with the usual skill and art of another exile, maestro Ricardo Aronovich («Providence», »Le souffle au coeur», »Le bal», «Missing»), the soundtrack is also a unique factor: at the beginning, when listening to steps to the fore and dubbed dialogues in a soundtrack entirely created a posteriori, I said to myself, "What is this? What happened to the sound effects editor?" As the film progressed, I realized that it is the strategy of the composer and sound designer, Edgardo Cantón, in a time when the term "sound design" was not heard of. In addition to precise musical commentaries (and a very good musical number, «Milonga de Manuel Flores», composed by Aníbal Troilo with lyrics by Borges), Cantón made a dense sound string of voices, dialogues and premonitory squawks, overwhelming screams, machinery and crawling feet following one another, sometimes in a completely autonomous fashion, divorced from the image. All the elements were combined in an effective and forceful way until the end.
The experience of «Invasión» was not an isolated postmodern incursion without continuity: on the contrary, Hugo Santiago made several feature films in France, like «Les autres» (1974), co-written with Borges and Bioy Casares; «Écoute voir...» (1979) with Catherine Deneuve; a number of «audiovisual objects», as he himself called a series of works on art and its creators' biographies. Of the planned trilogy, Santiago could only complete «Les trottoirs de Saturne» (1986), with a script by Argentinian writer Juan José Saer, in which a musician from Aquilea is exiled in Paris. By 2009 he had the script for the final entry, «Adiós», written in solitary, but the project was postponed in favor of other projects and in the end Santiago could not make it, as he died on February 27, 2018.
